


Calculation Errors

by some1_around



Series: Wrap Your Arms Around Me [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Anthony Edward Stark, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Howard Stark Character-Study, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Pregnancy, Prequel, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Stand Alone, Tags Are Hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-02 20:08:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12733440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/some1_around/pseuds/some1_around
Summary: Howard Stark was a cold, terrible, callous man for much of his life.But, in the end, he was still just a man.(Prequel to "Seven" and "The First Six," but can definitely read as a stand-alone)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For those following the series: I have been trying again and again to write the story where Tony finally tells the team (or, spoiler alert, is more likely coerced into revealing the truth after lying) about how his marks were destroyed, but it just hasn’t been coming together. This came to me and I loved it and I thought it added to this story in a way I can confidently say Seven was lacking. Humanizing villains is the absolute best way to make good stories (that’s why Loki is so beloved). With that being said, I am in no way trying to justify any of Howard’s actions – more like explain why they happened in the first place.

Howard Stark is there for the moment his son is birthed into the world, though only just.

He had been on a business trip in London, organizing the first few deals that will expand his company from just purely weapons (though he has no plans of dropping that division either), scheduled a safe three weeks before Maria’s due date.

He’d just shaken the last hand in the room when he receives the call, answers it to frantic sputtering from his new assistant who still fears him as the all-powerful American weapons monger. He exits the building, an annoyed sneer taking residence on his lips, because he’s never been a patient man, when he finally tells the young boy to spit it out.

“It-it’s your wife, Sir,” the assistant finally stutters, just as Howard slides into the chauffeured car awaiting him. “She’s – Sir, she’s gone into _labor_.”

In one breath, Howard tells the driver to book it to the airport – _fuck my luggage, you’ll get a thousand dollar bonus for every unit you go above the speed limit_ – and fires the assistant gasping to him from the other side of the planet – _fucking incompetent child, how could it possibly take that long for you to inform me that my son is being born?_ – before he sinks back into his seat.

Howard has never been gladder in his life for the lack of paparazzi because he knows that look on his face would paint him as any simple plebian incapable of higher thought.

His son is being born.

No thought, not even the news of the pregnancy, has ever managed to so completely astound Howard Stark before.

He’d met Maria a decade earlier, one of the few women in the lecture hall when he’d visited MIT to give a speech about the business world. She’d caught his eye in the dark room, from a dozen rows back, and the glint in the brown depths coupled with the curls so soft Howard would gladly condemn himself to suffocation in them. After the lecture, her lovely accent and actually fairly intellectual questions capture his ear, and her perfume catches his nose (if such a saying exists, and if it doesn’t, then he invents it – he is Howard Stark, after all).

He takes her out for a coffee at an establishment that costs more for entrance than he is sure her entire family pays for their apartment in a year. She confirms as much over their drinks. Howard, for the first time in a long time, finds himself actually enraptured by the words of someone not only young but also foreign and _poor_ of all things. There’s something in the tilt of her chin that reminds his – obscurely – of blue eyes and blonde hair, yet she’s different enough that he feels no guilt for it.

They meet for drinks several times more, but Maria never allows it to go farther than that. On their fifth meeting – longer than Howard has ever seen another woman in his life – he offers her a proposition. He offers her a mansion, and galas, and endless meals and luxuries and more than she could ever dream of having. Obadiah’s voice echoes in his head, telling him how the board and the consumers want him to be seen as trustworthy, especially when he’s managing their weapons. A pretty, good-mannered wife with a decent head on her shoulders will be a crucial aid to that.

Maria Carbonell, despite the gleam in her eyes, eventually responds with a slight headshake. Howard is much too old to be appropriate, she tells him, and her parents would never approve. Besides, she adds hesitantly, she’s quite sure her soulmark of a White Ibis in flight is not shared by Howard.

He nods acceptingly, pays for their meal, and leaves the restaurant. He does not contact Maria again.

She’s the one who contacts him.

Jarvis comes to his study one day, tells him that a young Ms. Carbonell has requested to see him and that she is quite upset, and Jarvis asks if she should be let in. Howard purses his lips and squints his eyes, considering carefully. Finally, he nods, tells Jarvis to bring her in, and sits back to wait, fashioning a smirk to rest on his lips.

It is the first of a handful of direct decisions that will dramatically impact Howard’s life from that point forward.

Maria looks far from the bright-eyed, devilish little girl he’d first seen in the lecture hall. Her eyes and nose or raw-red, the brown nothing but hopeless. Her perfume now carries the recognizable tint of vodka, and her sniffles are perhaps the least attractive thing Howard has ever heard in his presence.

She comes in, Jarvis shutting the door behind her, and pushes up her sleeve to show the mark that would’ve bound her to another person. Where it used to glimmer blue and white, it is now grey and blurred, in the manner that the surface of a pond ripples. Her soul mate has died. Maria tells him that her parents have abandoned her, that having a soul mate die before you meet them is the ultimate sign of dishonor and untrustworthiness in their eyes. She has lost her funding for schooling, her purpose in her family, and her hope for the future. She agrees to the proposition he posed to her months ago. She has nothing left but what he offers.

Howard studies her mark, idly taps his fingers on the oak wood of his desk, and looks her up and down. Finally, he stands, placing his hand on top of Maria’s. he calls Jarvis in, tells his butler to bring in some new maids to cater to Maria and tells him to find someone to escort her to the rooms next to his and see that she is cleaned up. Jarvis’ look is blasé in response, but he does as he’s requested, and Maria’s excessive gratitude fill Howard’s chest with a feeling of accomplishment.

A week later he introduces Maria Carbonell to Obadiah Stane, his long-time friend, and business partner, and a week after that they are being tended to by a very private employee who bestows upon Howard’s skin Maria’s symbol of a cluster of oleander, and then on both of them a fabricated tattoo of complex gears to symbolize Howard. He knows the flicker he sees in Maria’s eyes is her worry at finding out that she has agreed to marry, to bind herself to, a man who carries no marks, not even his own. It’s a genetic defect, Howard soothes her later that night, a side effect of his father working on nuclear projects around the time of his conception and hereditary factors. It happens only to one in a million, but it does happen.

He comforts her physically that night, bare skin against skin, for the first time. Her first time. The next day they stand together and announce the news of their bond to the world, followed quickly by a wedding date.

Howard thinks he sees the first sign of regret beginning to show in Maria’s eyes, but she’s signed a contract sealing her to the thousand-thread-count sheets of her bed, and Howard will see to it that she lies luxuriously.

After the honeymoon – a glorious affair in the Bahamas during which, for a brief moment when Maria smiles beatifically at him over the backdrop of the sunset over the ocean, Howard wonders if what is between them could perhaps become something more – things return almost entirely back to the way they were. He spends increasing time away from the mansion as overseas deals pick up, and notices that along with dresses and pillows, the household expenditure on vodka rises over the years. Now the difference is that the occasional meals he eats outside of the workshop are shared silently with his wife and when he attends galas it is with a beautiful woman on his arm. Maria seeks him out most often only when he has just returned from long business trips when she is clearly starving for some attention that doesn’t come from paid servants. He offers her trips around the world, invitations to any event that she could want, but she always turns them down. She couldn’t bear to, she says. Howard doesn’t quite know what she means.

Ten years pass in a comfortable, steady decline in their personal lives, but the company soars and it’s good enough for Howard.

Or at least he believed it to be until October 25th, 1969, when he arrived home from a much too long day at work, wishing to be greeted by his butler with a drink in hand, but finding instead his usually secluded wife.

Maria is pale and her hands shake when she meets Howard in the foyer. He greets her, uncertain and unused to her presence, and she slowly looks up, meets his eyes – and she looks so frightened, but Howard couldn’t possibly miss the tiny sparkle, the infinitesimal gleaming that he hasn’t seen so truly since the very day he met her.

“I’m pregnant,” she tells him, and Howard Stark falls to his knees for the first time in his too long life.

Those eight months are undoubtedly the best of their marriage, despite Maria’s mood swings and pains and Obi’s constant badgering. Howard wonders if this connection he feels – the connection of knowing that a piece of himself belongs within Maria – is what it feels like to have and love and be loved by a soulmate. He tells himself that it is and he revels in the feeling, smiles goofily, sweeps Maria into his arms, sleeps in her bed for the first time ever, presses his lips to her taut stomach skin because this is what it must feel like to start over.

In all honesty, though Howard had dedicated hour after hour trying to preemptively learn everything he could about the son – _a boy, Maria, we’re having a baby boy_ – that would soon crawl out to greet the world, meticulously studying DNA patterns and running simulations, trying to know everything he could, he had never particularly put much thought into his son’s soulmarks. Being markless was somewhat hereditary, with Howard sharing the gene with an uncle and a cousin (neither of whom he’d seen since his rise to money and power or planned to see ever) and with Maria’s catastrophically bad luck of her soulmate dying before she’d had the chance to meet them, so perhaps he’d distantly assumed that those two factors would manifest in his son.

Soulmarks didn’t appear on stillborn children or any who had been aborted, and no machines to date had been able to pick out an image in an ultrasound. For all likelihood, it seemed that marks only developed during labor and not anytime before. Nothing could really explain that, but then again marks were almost completely unexplainable by science anyway – the main reason Howard disliked the concept in general and was never too concerned about not having one himself.

It just doesn’t occur to him.

Instead, he runs simulations that build an image of his child moments after his birth, then plays the assumed aging process he will take through life. He calculates allergies the baby is likely to acquire, predicts inclinations he will feel towards one food group or another. Gets his assumed IQ – just slightly lower than Howard, but this is the least sure of his tests, and no son of Howard’s could be less than perfect anyway.

He’s sure that he would know everything there was to know about his child, right up until the day he speeds a jet across the ocean in seven hours and storms into a hospital room just in time to grip Maria’s hand as she pushes for the last time.

Anthony Edward Stark comes into the world with such a disgruntled look on his face that Maria tiredly makes chuckles out a comment about him already being insulted by the lack of intelligence in those who surround him. Howard says nothing, merely takes the baby into shaking arms when he’s carefully handed over by a nurse in blue scrubs.

He names the child Anthony because this boy in his arms is the only thing that has felt truly priceless to the billionaire in years. He names him Edward after his father because he hopes to always be reminded that he cannot spoil this one thing, that Anthony Edward Stark is precious and must remain so.

He dictates all of this to the nurse standing by before he catches sight of the mark – a white star backed by blue, surrounded by two circles or red and one of blue – plastered on the sides of Anthony’s ribs.

All of a sudden it’s if Howard has been seeing the world through the reflection of a mirror, but in that moment it had just been shattered. Everything is still there, looks exactly the same, but it’s backwards and it’s _wrong_ and Howard doesn’t know what to do for the first time in a very long time.

“Howard?” he hears, a tentative voice breaking him from his roiling shock, and slim fingers curl over his elbow. He whirls, breaking the light grip, and sees Maria looking up at him with big, beautiful, concerned brown eyes. “Baby, is something wrong?” she asks softly, gently, and tries for a smile that communicated nothing but trust and empathy.

Something about it makes disgust curl in Howard’s gut and he turns away from the mother of his child.

“Cover those marks,” he snaps, shoving the baby into the arms of a waiting nurse. “I don’t want the media getting their hands on any story about them.”

He storms from the room without another word, and just before the door shuts behind him, he hears the first wail from a baby who had been born into the world as silent as the whisper of a cloud on a spring day. For a second, the noise pierces something deep within Howard, something that had begun to rise up in the past eight months for the first time since he was fifteen and his father died and Howard didn’t have the money to pay for a funeral.

For a split second, Howard nearly hesitates, nearly turns back around, nearly throws away all his doubts and worries to replace them with a son who will grow and laugh and flourish if he just works hard enough.

He very nearly does, but then the door clicks shut behind him, and the cry is silenced, and Howard shakes off the feeling of ghost-peoples cuddled up against his sides, laughing in his ears.

This is the second of the most important decisions that Howard Stark makes in his life. And, unlike the first, he will never reach a firm stance on whether it was the right choice, not until it is far, far too late, and there is no time left to change anything.

Howard Stark walks out of the hospital and slides gracefully into a waiting car, pulls a notepad from his back pocket, and begins sketching out a plan for a recovery team to be sent into the Arctic. He has a soldier to find.

(He will not let his son his son be as alone as Howard has felt his whole life. He will not let his son be anything less than the pillar of perfection that Captain America – that _Steve Rogers_ , his friend, deserved. _Deserves_.)

He refuses.

(Coincidentally, this refusal is the third decision Howard makes, although it doesn’t affect his own life so much as his son’s. But Howard won’t live to find out to what great extent.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is definitely more dependant on the rest of the series, and you should definitely read those stories first if you want to avoid spoilers for them. You can still read this if you haven't, but it might not fully make sense.

A little less than seventeen years later, Howard Stark is driving down a dark road at night, with no security detail but Maria next to him, and dangerously powerful cargo in the trunk. He and Maria drive in silence, and her frosty, dismissive attitude as of recent terrifies Howard because it makes him wonder if she _knows_ , knows what did. She doesn’t, of course. Maria was never the best mother after she rekindled her romance with a bottle of vodka (not that Howard is in _any_ position to criticize her, he knows that too), but she knows that their son is in a hospital on the other side of the country and that Howard won’t let her visit him, and for that, they aren’t speaking.

Not that they were likely to anyways, but that was beside the point.

It accumulates to the point where Howard’s driving is distracted enough that it wouldn’t be terribly unlikely for them to have crashed even if the black-clad assailant hadn't shot out their tires and sent them careening into the nearest tree, Howard’s head slamming against the dash with the force.

He’s probably dying, but his life does not flash before his life. Instead, he sees only one moment, captured perfectly in his flickering eyes.

His father, Edward Stark, leans down to look his son in the eyes, a tired smile on his lips, exhaustion in his stance. “ _World’s a difficult place, kid_ ,” his father’s apparition tells him, and he may be exhausted down to his very bone from a long day’s work with very little payback, but there’s still love in his words. “ _It’s gonna beat you down, knock the air out of your lungs. But for us Starks?”_ His father smiles, and Howard feels the phantom feeling stretch over what was once a childish mouth. “ _We’re made of iron, Howie. Never forget that_.”

Howard never did. But, over the course of seventy years and a lot of trial and heartbreak, he’d forgotten what it felt like to be so unchangingly loved.

He turns his head to the side, shoves his way out of the car to collapse to his knees on hard asphalt. Someone – a motorcyclist – stops, and he gasps, “Help my wife. Please, help.” A hand grabs his hair, and for a moment he thinks he must be already dead because that is a face he recognizes, “Sergeant Barnes,” he gasps, feels a string a blood trail down his chin.

“Howard!” the voice calls from inside the car, weak, but alive, but Howard can't say anything back.

His vision is suddenly overrun by a new image, this one much more recent.

 _Terrified brown eyes stare up at him from the floor, already full of pain and anguish, but Howard is so scared, so_ betrayed _, betrayed on behalf of Steve, who deserved so much better than to share a soulmate with five others, that he couldn’t make himself care about the fear in his son’s eyes. It hadn't registered, much like the red star on his shoulder hadn't registered._

For a moment, he stares up into the face of someone who died three decades ago, and remembers Bucky, flexing in his lab as they compared his strength to Steve’s, and he remembers the red star on both of their shoulders.

Howard is never given the time to rethink any of his decisions. He’s never given the time to consider what any of the startling new information he garners in his last moments mean. He isn't given the time to apologize, to atone, for any of the many, many terrible things he had done without regret.

But in his very last moment, it is not the pain of his face being bashed in by sturdy metal, or the internal bleeding in his abdomen that takes prominence. It’s not even the desperate calls of Maria, who gave up her every chance at life she could have had without even knowing it.

In Howard’s last moment, he remembers large, round brown eyes blinking up at him through thickly clumped lashes with an expression that so clearly said, “ _You got nothing on me_ ,” even on the face of a baby less than five minutes old. He remembers those eyes, and the last time he’d seen them, and Howard Stark’s cold heart is engulfed in pain.

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone has any specific ideas for the next installment in the series (any prompts you wanna see or the way you want things to pan out) please do suggest things, this series IS NOT OVER.
> 
> Thanks for reading.


End file.
